Common Mistakes Made By Facebook Advertising Novices

Jakeson Christopher
Plus Marketing
Published in
7 min readDec 1, 2020

Advertisers who are new to Facebook advertising must be very panicked, so they tend to do some seemingly effective things, but often these things are often people make mistakes.

Mistake #1-No sense of goal

In most cases, this is because you have no idea about the various terms of Facebook advertising optimization.

Facebook’s advertising goals are diverse, and the types of advertising often introduce new ones. Different measurement indicators are derived from this. In order to facilitate understanding, we can treat them as KPIs. It must be particularly emphasized here: If you want to know whether the Facebook ads you place are effective for your brand, you must know which indicators you need to use to measure.

For example, in the case of Facebook ROI (return on advertising investment), you can use these different actions:

  • New homepage “Like”
  • Post interaction
  • Mail registration
  • Website click
  • Website sales or sales leads

In view of the different business goals of each advertiser, we will not specifically specify which indicators should be tracked. If you are just starting a new brand, then the goal of building brand awareness should be even more important-therefore, you need to find ways to increase your homepage followers.

The most important thing is to make sure that you have a specific sense of goal. Make sure you have a systematic understanding of terms related to Facebook advertising before you start. such as:

You only have to know what a homepage like is, why you want to get homepage likes, how to get homepage likes and a series of knowledge,

Only then can there be a more specific goal that should be set, assuming that it is to add 100 homepage likes every month-and use regular checks to ensure that your budget is properly used.

Mistake 2-Use the wrong ad format

This is usually caused by two reasons: Either you are a newbie to Facebook advertising and don’t know how to choose the right format for your specific ad; or one of your ads has been running for a while, and it has been in the past. very effective. But as Facebook continues to introduce rich advertising formats, your original advertising appeal has gradually decreased or even disappeared.

Facebook continues to introduce new forms of advertising, on the one hand to increase sales; on the other hand, it is also to minimize the decline in user experience caused by a single advertising format. Remember, the user’s attention is very limited and getting lower and lower. In my observation, for a long period of time, Facebook’s main form of advertising was Single Image; after that, Carosel and video ads were developed, and then CINEMAGRAPH, CANVAS. , The current 360 video advertising; and the ongoing LIVE, Mid-Roll video interstitial advertising.

Facebook’s recent new advertising formats are CANVAS and 360 video advertising. Canvas allows advertisers to post rich media full-screen advertisements (integrated carousel pictures, single images, small videos, etc.) on the mobile terminal; 360 video ads allow advertisers to display products or tell brand stories through panoramic videos. These brand-new forms, although the cost has increased accordingly; each time they are released, they will bring a period of dividends. Although the user’s attention has been decreasing, they are always curious about novel things.

The amount spent on different advertising formats is also different. The following is the average cost of different Facebook Placements in 2020. This will help a lot.

Data Source:Facebook ads cost tool — ADCostly

Mistake 3-You only have one campaign

There are 3 levels of Facebook advertising, from small to large, advertising-ad group-ad campaign.

In the official definition of Facebook, an ad campaign is a marketing activity to meet specific advertising goals; an ad group is a combination of ads that differ in a certain characteristic. This shows that Facebook’s ads are built and revolved around ad groups in a sense — an ad group is a group of ads that contain different “daily advertising budgets, advertising schedules, advertising bidding methods, and advertising target audiences.”

As a novice, if you don’t have a deep understanding of ad groups, maybe you think the easiest way is to put all these different ads in one ad group to compare their effectiveness. This is not the case. For Facebook, they have an algorithm at the system level that optimizes all the ads of each ad group of advertisers into a best-performing ad — — officially called automatic optimization. If you concentrate too many ads in one campaign, many ads will not get enough impressions.

After setting up multiple campaigns, you should use some calculators so that you can quickly get back to your advertising effect. If there is a situation where advertising costs too much or too little, you should stop or modify it in time. These are two free Google expansion calculators, you can quickly and easily calculate your CPC, CPM, CPA, ROI and Roas.

CPC & CPM & CPA Calculator

ROI & Roas Calculator

Mistake 4 — The target audience is too broad

In the traditional media era, the primary consideration for advertising is coverage; whether it is print media such as newspapers and magazines (corresponding to Facebook image ads) or video streaming media such as TV stations (corresponding to Facebook video ads); you will find that they are all distributed The larger the volume, or the more viewers, the higher the advertising unit price.

In the age of social media advertising, what you should value most is to push the right ads to the right people. Remember those audience targeting features that Facebook mentioned? Accurate audience targeting means that your ads are more likely to be seen by customers who may actively respond to you, rather than being presented to users who don’t pay much attention to it.

In fact, if you think your advertising engagement is too low, then you should first consider whether it is because the audience is too broad. You can try to refine the positioning strategy, set one more positioning rule each time, and then see what changes. Improve the accuracy of the positioning strategy through multiple attempts.

You can get more advertising interest audiences for free by using the Facebook ads cost tool. A core interest can be used, so that more audience interests can be expanded.

Mistake 5-You did not go straight to the topic

Be sober: advertising is not for good health, but for making money. In order to make money, you must be able to grasp the short-term attractiveness of customers (about less than 8 seconds) and find a way to convince them to take the action you expect in a short period of time. This is the role of the “call to action” in your advertisement, as David Ogilvy said: An advertisement requires an attractive promise to capture customers; and the promise should be short enough.

For the best results, David Ogilvy made his recommendation-use no more than 14 words as your title. And I also want to make a personal suggestion: try to use short links for your website.

Mistake 6 — Too much text is used in the ad image

Maybe you have a creative team that puts all the positive comments of real users together to create a convincing product image (as we often see on Taobao). This looks really good, so you put all these texts in your Facebook ads, but in the end you were rejected due to Facebook’s ad content policy restrictions.

This may be rejected during the ad approval stage, or it may be rejected after the ad has been put on for a period of time. Some people may conclude that Facebook’s current advertising policies are ambiguous and elusive. In fact, the working mechanism of Facebook advertising is to approve while running. Even if some ads are approved by the algorithm, they will be lowered or stopped by Facebook because they do not meet the user interaction evaluation.

In fact, Facebook may have its own mechanism to reduce the delivery and exposure of heavy text content ads to avoid the impact of its user experience. This means that similar ads with a large proportion of images and text must be less effective than those with a small proportion or no text.

Our suggestions for this are:

1. Try to use pictures without text

2. If you need to add text to the picture, you can consider using Facebook’s official text grid detection tool

--

--